Container-based Microservice Architecture for Cloud Applications

Cloud Environment allows enterprises to scale their application on demand. Microservice design is a new paradigm for cloud application development which is gaining popularity due to its granular approach and loosely coupled services unlike monolithic design with single code base. Applications developed using microservice design results in better scaling and gives extended flexibility to the developers with minimum cost. In this paper, first, different challenges in deployment and continuous integration of microservices are analyzed. To overcome these challenges, later, an automated system is proposed and designed which helps in deployment and continuous integration of microservices. Containers are recently heavily used in deploying the applications as they are easy to manage and lightweight when compared to traditional Virtual Machines (VMs). We have deployed the proposed microservices architecture on the docker containers and tested using a social networking application as case study. Finally, the results are presented and the performance of monolithic and microservice approach is compared using various parameters such as response time, throughput, deployment time etc. Results show that application developed using microservice approach and deployed using the proposed design reduce the time and effort for deployment and continuous integration of the application. Results also shows that microservice based application outperform monolithic design because of its low response time and high throughput.